Boskone 36 Convention Report
A convention report by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1999 by Evelyn C. Leeper
Panel: SF
Blockbusters: Are Big Budgets and Special Effects Hurting SF Moviemaking?
Panel: The Regency and the Emperor: Popularity of the Late
18th/Early 19th Centuries
Panel: From Wells to Willis -- Variations on Time Travel in
Science Fiction
Panel: The Past and Future of SF Short Stories: A Dialog
Panel: Masters of SF Satire: The Science Fiction of Tenn,
Sheckley, and Pohl
Panel: You Probably Haven't Heard of ... But You Should Have
and You Will
Panel: Rampaging Dinosaurs, Jet Propelled Turtles, & Giant
Spiders: BIG Monster Movies
Guest of Honor and Other Speeches
The Best of the Art Show: A Guided Tour
Panel: This Book Sucks: How Not To Write Reviews
Panel: Why Is This Timeline Different from All Other
Timelines? Jewish Alternate Histories
Panel: The Origins of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Theories
and Science Fiction
Boskone 36 was held February 12-14, 1999, in
Framingham, Massachusetts. There were approximately 800 attendees.
While a lot was the same this year as
previous years, there were some differences, not all good. Boskone switched to
a newspaper-style program book (apparently trying for a more timely volume as
well as lower costs), but it was hard to use—it is diffi cult to "leaf
through" a ragged-cut newspaper, and the arrangement was a bit different
from what I was used to.
Another glitch was the out-of-date nature of
the restaurant guide in it (ironic, given the changes were supposed to make it
more timely). In particular, the Bangkok Oriental had gone out of business, as
we discovered when we went there Saturday night.
The hotel had major problems with temperature
control due to the untimely heat wave (it was 72 degrees Fahrenheit outside
when we left work Friday) which caused problems with the air conditioning
system and the water used caused a ceiling collapse in t he dealers room (no
damage to dealers’ stock reported).
As usual, we arrived too late for any Friday
panels. Kate also arrived late: the express bus driver was new and did not
realize he was supposed to stop in Amherst as well as at UMass, so she
had to wait two hours for the next bus. (Luckily she lives a block from the bus
stop and could go home, have a cup of tea, watch a movie, and go back two hours
later.) This meant she had only twenty-one minutes in the dealers room Friday,
but still managed to spend $107. She thinks this is a record; are there any
other contenders?
We, on the other hand, bought nothing in the
dealers room. There were a couple of Tor Doubles I had some interest in, but $5
each was more than I wanted to spend for books whose contents I already had
elsewhere. Given my overloaded reading stack (abo ut two hundred books), I’m
really looking for only a half-dozen books or so, and they just were not there.
This should not be taken as a negative rating of the dealers room; other people
were quite happy about all they found there.
Panel:
SF Blockbusters: Are Big Budgets and Special Effects Hurting SF Moviemaking?
Saturday, 10 AM
Daniel Kimmel (M), Mark R. Leeper, Jim Mann
"Are special effects and big budgets causing
ruining movies? Are they pushing producers to spend more and more time on
spectacle and less time on plot and characterization? Is there an upside to the
push for big budgets?"
After introductions, Kimmel claimed that
special effects cause big budgets, but not vice versa. (This is not a
hard-and-fast rule, especially now with CGI.) Mann pointed out that effects are
often now the whole purpose of movie, "with no thought giving to plot or
acting or anything else."
Leeper said that spectacle has been with us
from the very beginning, but it was in historical or action films. As he noted,
there were several spectacle movies that had the same plot: "Two people
who were old friends fighting each other in the la st reel"—Ben Hur,
The Vikings, and so on. But then spectacle films turned to science
fiction. After all, he said, producers figure that Vikings are just old-time
Klingons. But we still have the thoughtful science fiction.
Kimmel agreed with the historical
perspective. He further noted that budget has little correlation to success
(but later noted that science fiction films seem to be expensive). "Money
[in the form of budget] is not the root of all evil." H e further asked,
"What is spectacle?" He claimed that The Wizard of Oz is
spectacle, but is Gattaca? His definition of a spectacle film was one in
which "you don’t even care about the story or the characters because
you’re s o caught up in the visuals." His reaction on seeing Gattaca
was, "This is very intelligent so it’s not going to go anywhere."
Leeper said that science fiction needs
spectacle in addition to ideas. Kimmel seemed to agree, at least commercially,
because he said he was concerned when he first saw The Truman Show,
thinking it might have problems because of its lack of spe cial effects. A film
like Pi, he said, could be low-budget and lacking in special effects
because it played in the art houses. (Kimmel also recommended The Sticky
Fingers of Time, another science fiction film with no special effects).
But Kimmel said that major studios want
big-budget films with big successes, not small films even if they produce
proportional returns. And schlock goes to cable or home video. Mann quoted Tony
Randall in an interview from the 1980s in which Randall said that studios did
not want a $3 million return on a $1 million investment, they want $70 million
on $15 million.
Mann raised the question of whether the
audience is demanding this amount of expense. Kimmel compared it to an arms
race. Mann said the 90/10 rule seemed to be in effect: 90% of the expense is
used to get the last 10% of effect. Leeper pointed out t hat special effects
used to help carry the story along without being convincing. For example, he
said, when he was young he attended an opera performed with marionettes. It was
not realistic, but no one objected. (Indeed, even today stagecraft can be f ar
more symbolic than movies, though Broadway has also moved to the realistic
spectacle.) But, Leeper continued, we’ve raised a generation that expects
realism. Kimmel claimed that special effects are what makes it real to us even
if it is unrealistic ( e.g., sound in space).
Mann insisted that we can do both—some
special effects movies have more than just special effects. Kimmel noted that
one factor is the tension between movies and television, which has brought
about wide-screen, color (or rather the decline of black-an d-white), Dolby,
etc. And you need lots of special effects for the trailer.
Leeper said that although it was a bit of a
cliche, the film industry is an industry, and has to have a dependable
product. You can order dependable special effects, but you can’t order a
dependable idea. And Kimmel quoted another truism: &quo t;That’s why it’s
called show business, not show art."
Kimmel said that while one could order
special effects, there was a life cycle for them. For example, he mentioned
that Altered States had the rippling skin effect that made everyone
"ooh" and "ah," but now that’s old hat. Similarly, Terminator
2 had the morphing, and now that’s old hat.
Mann said that the effects techniques were
accelerating, but missed the time when he used to look forward to the next Ray
Harryhausen film. Kimmel said that when Harryhausen was asked what he thought
of today’s special effects, Harryhausen said that w hen he did it the screen
would say, "Special Effects—Ray Harryhausen, period." Now, he said,
there’s five minutes of special effects credits.
Someone said, "Star Wars is slow
by modern standards," generating the response from one panelist:
"That’s scary."
Kimmel noted that Pleasantville
ostensibly does not look like a big-budget special effects film, but was
actually very involved to do.
From the audience, Nomi Burstein said that
the special effects in Who Framed Roger Rabbit were also something that
everyone ended up doing. Burstein said that Gary Wolfe is scheduled to do a
prequel with Steven Spielberg using 3-dimensional-loo king toons, and they
needed a new level of special effects to do this. Man says that what we are
seeing are "attempts to perfect special effects to the Nth degree,"
and cited the re-issue of Star Wars, with its "beefing up" of
the older effects. Kimmel pointed out that the new scenes do not add
information to the movie, and Mann not only agreed, but thought that the new
scenes in first film were "glitz, a waste, and distracting." Kimmel
said that the purpose was rea lly that Lucas wanted to test the new special
effects for the new "Star Wars" movies to see if audiences would
accept them.
Looking for a combination of special effects
with literate film-making, Kimmel said he would like to see Kenneth Branagh do
a science fiction film. (He said Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein does not
count.) He also mentioned Coppola’s Bram Stoke r’s Dracula. Twister
et al are not science fiction movies, he said—they’re amusement park rides. You
need a powerful director who says, "I have a vision, I have a story I want
to tell." Producer-driven work gives you Deep Impact , Armageddon,
and Godzilla.
Mann disagreed a bit, saying that Deep
Impact tried to be something else other than an amusement park ride; it has
a real cast and its mistake was concentrating on a lesser character. Kimmel
conceded that, but said that Armageddon was &q uot;boom boom
joke" except when it was "joke joke boom." On the other hand, he
said, The Peacemaker was "boom boom snore."
Kimmel gave The Fifth Element as an
example of how "sometimes the story isn’t worth telling." And What
Dreams May Come was overproduced. (I described it as "a triumph of art
direction over everything else.") He also cited Toys as another
overproduced film. These are the sorts of things that Ken Russell can do this
with a script and a tight budget, he said. Other films mentioned were Dark
City and City of Lost Children. Kimmel said in these, t he art
direction is incredibly vivid, but these movies are about scripts and stories
and the art direction serves the story. "And the mood," added Mann.
And Kimmel added, "And Gattaca," as another film served by its
visuals, n ot driven by them.
Kimmel said, "If I want to see just the
visuals, I go to a museum." He said he was not saying that City of Lost
Children was a serious story, but there was a story there.
Kimmel also mentioned that for those in the
audience who do not track the industry, it is helpful to know there are seasons
for films. The summer is amusement park films, while December is serious films,
October is mostly mediocre horror films, etc. Another clue is that if the
executive producer is the major creative force, it is probably a good sign.
I observe that I thought Jackie Chan provided
more bang for the production buck than James Bond. The panelists said that
foreign films in general provide more bang for the buck.
Kimmel said, "I keep saying story,
story, story, but this is not a universal attitude," and cited Japanese
anime as a counter-example. Mann quoted C. S. Lewis regarding reading
"trash adventure versus "good" adventure; Lewis o bserved that
"people who read trash don’t want stuff like characterization bogging them
down" (Mann’s words, not Lewis’s). Similarly, people who want
action/special effects films may very well not want story bogging them down.
And someone in the audience said that Gattaca would be a terrible date
movie, because you could not concentrate on it.
Panel:
The Regency and the Emperor: Popularity of the Late 18th/Early 19th Centuries
Saturday, 11 AM
Leigh Grossman, Sharon Lee, Madeleine E. Robins, Susan Shwartz
"The late 18th and early 19th
centuries are popular both with readers in general and with science fiction
readers in particular. On one side you have the popularity of books set in the
Napoleonic Wars, such the Hornblower nov els and the Sharpe novels. You also
have many fans of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. And of course you have many
fans of Patrick O’Brian, whose works reflect both of these sides of the time
period. Why is this period and these works so popular with SF f ans?"
Shwartz began by saying that based on her
background, she could talk about Patrick O’Brian and insider trading. I’m not
familiar with the O’Brian’s books, so I do not know if this is useful.
Grossman suggested that people like to read
books set in the time of the Regency because they are about people leading
lives as complex as ours, but in which everybody knows the rules. Robins said that
in addition, everybody wants to imagine herself e ither the Duke’s daughter, or
the goosegirl (because even if you were at the bottom, you had no way to go but
up). But if you were in the middle, you were stuck with following the rules.
Shwartz said that in the film Persuasion,
Anne Eliot is "right at the edge of what she can get away with," and
to survive and act as she did required a lot of courage. Grossman described
Austen’s characters as being at best the bottom of the upper crust—they are
wealthy but untitled. And Shwartz noted that another popular character, Horatio
Hornblower, is the son of a doctor (and not of a Harley Street physician). He
is a self-made man, an officer and a gentleman. Jack (O’Brian’s c haracter?),
however, is not a gentleman. And someone noted that all O’Brian’s officers are
titled, but their wives come from all levels.
Grossman said, "With Hornblower, there’s
all the suffering," and Shwartz responded, "He needs Prozac."
From the audience, Mark Keller mentioned
Richard Sharpe, who starts as a private soldier and rises. He marries into the
upper class but it fails. Grossman pointed out that for at the time, when you
enlisted in the British army, it was for life, not j ust a few years, so it was
for people with no other options. Robins said that while this was true,
Austen’s and Heyer’s characters still look down more on someone in trade rather
than a soldier or sailor with prize money. Grossman said that in spite of this,
the army was not a mode of upward mobility.
It all hinges on economics, Robins said. All
a woman could offer other than money was her virginity so this was considered
very important. (Shwartz pointed out that Princess Diana was
"examined" for this before her marriage.)
Regarding the comment earlier about rules, an
audience member said that the grimmest book she had read was A Civil
Contract by Georgette Heyer, in which they follow rules but it does not end
happily. Robins said that Heyer did this on purpose t o do something different
with the reader; she wanted to throw out the rules.
Grossman said that she had studied the books
that were the best-sellers then. There were books about all the rules, manners,
and so on of the upper class. Some readers looked down on them, and some used
them as guidebooks.
An audience member suggested Palliser’s Quincunx
as a book that shows what happens when women fall from the upper crust.
Grossman added George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss.
This was an era when the Napoleonic Wars,
Industrial Revolution, etc., were changing all the rules. And Robins said that
everything else was changing as well: music, art, etc. But though they set
their novels in this period, Heyer never mentions corn riots, and Austen barely
mentions Chartism or anything else. Robins thought that part of what appeals to
the modern reader is that the nobility in these novels do not realize they’re
"dancing on the edge of a precipice." This is related to sc ience
fiction, she continued, in that what we see is a society not used to
technological change getting hit with it.
Shwartz said that there was also a
preoccupation with land, and Grossman said that another omission was that
though all this takes place in the middle of the Enclosure Movement when
commons are about to go away, there was nothing explicit about that ei ther.
Grossman said that to understand the books,
one must have some knowledge of the era. For example, a pound had the buying
power of about $500 of today’s money, meaning that an annual income of a
hundred pounds was a substantial amount. We also need to know about the food,
drink ("gin was mother’s milk to her"), pharmacology (opium was the
wonder drug of the era, and laudanum was widely used). Grossman also said that
we can’t talk about Regency with mentioning costumes. An audience member s aid
that the Regency reminded us that "there were other generations who did
just as stupid things as high heels and bras." Robins added, "God
bless Beau Brummel, who actually made it fashionable to wash."
Though earlier, the story of the goose girl
who rises to a higher position was mentioned as having some interest, Robins
said that "no one wants to read the story of the goose girl [who remains a
goose girl]", they want to read about the uppe r class.
Until Dickens’s time, Grossman claimed, it
was not acceptable for men to read novels (or write them). She said that the
first novels for men were disguised as travel stories. Robins disputed this,
saying that the Prince of Wales asked Austen to dedic ate Emma to him,
which would indicate that he read at least some novels. Shwartz thought that
the lowly status of novels then was similar to the way science fiction is
looked at now.
Grossman said that this was also the period
that saw the start of the separation between work and home, and the work at
home, not being paid, gets devalued. Someone said that in the Regency women
still had some hope of doing useful work (consulting wi th husbands on land,
etc), but by Victorian times the only work allowed was ostentatiously useless
(e.g., fancy needlework).
Robins said this was also a period of
religious revival. This was Samuel Smiles promoted his self-improvement mantra
of "Every day in every way we’re getting better and better." Shwartz
pointed out that we do see the religious aspect in nov els such as Eliot’s Middlemarch
and Adam Bede. Grossman described it as the period of the "British
millennial movements." (In this case, "millennial" means more
like "the-end-of-the-world" than it refers to an y thousand-year
period.)
Panel:
From Wells to Willis -- Variations on Time Travel in Science Fiction
Saturday, 1 PM
Michael Burstein, Paul Levinson, Connie Willis
Levinson began by saying he found time travel
"fascinating and unique because it is utterly impossible" in a way
that faster-than-light travel is not. Faster-than-light travel, he explained is
impossible "only" due to current theor y, while time travel violates
certain fundamental logical aspects of our lives. For example, "travel to
future violates our sense of free will." And "because of those
possibilities, that’s why we find time travel so tantalizing and enjoya
ble."
Willis felt that the "past is the
ultimate forbidden country." And she said that when she was reading
science fiction when she was growing up, space travel felt possible, but time
travel did not. "It’s the sense that the past is so tru ly irrevocable
that makes us long for it." She describe the scene in Peggy Sue Got
Married where the time-traveling Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) answers the
telephone and realizes it is her grandmother, whom she remembers as being dead
for yea rs. "Memory," Willis said, "is such a strong and
powerful time machine." And we like time travel stories because of the
"ideas of loss and regreat and a more innocent time." "Time
travel is the most powerful raw materi al or symbol or trope we have in science
fiction," she concluded.
Burstein said he was the only physicist on
panel, so felt obliged to point out that he believed that we will not be able
to accelerate through the speed of light no matter what, though
faster-than-light travel is possible if it does not involve that so rt of
acceleration. And faster-than-light travel is time travel according to
physicists, so it is not meaningful to say one is possible and the other not.
But Burstein thought the real appeal of time
travel stories was that they are nostalgic. There are, he claimed, three
elements that time travel stories could have. The first is nostalgia (this
would be stories like Jack Finney’s Time and Again or Richard Matheson’s
Bid Time Return). The second is paradoxes, of which the ultimate is
"Niven’s Paradox," which states that a universe in which a time
machine is invented is inherently unstable, and time travelers will keep
changing it until they create a universe in which no time machine is invented.
The third element is to see the future, and relativity will get you this.
Burstein did say that physicists theorize
that if two cosmic strings are passing each other at high speed and you go
around them, you could go back in time. However, he claimed cosmic strings do
not exist, so he said this amounted to saying, "If you did something
impossible with two non-existent things you could go back in time."
Levinson said he did not agree that
faster-than-light travel is intrinsically time travel, but thinks it is just
part of Einstein’s theory, which could be wrong.
Willis said that using time travel allows you
to examine the physics or philosophy, to write historical novels, or to do
game-playing with paradoxes—or all three. She recommended a few classic
time-travel stories: "Child by Chronos" (by Char les Harness),
"The Yehudi Principle" (by Frederic Brown), "By His
Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinlein, and
"The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" by Alfred Bester. The other panelists
mentioned "G reat Escape Tours, Inc." (by Kit Reed) an "A Little
Something for Us Tempunauts" (by Philip K. Dick), both in the anthology Final
Stage edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg..
Levinson said that a lot of this was what he
though of as "the metaphysics of time travel," and that
H. G. Wells tied all the elements together: the machine, a
travelogue, and the metaphysics. He also thought that the time travel s tory
was an example that artistic mode may seem exhausted but then get revitalized.
He personally likes stories in which people are changing things and turn out
bringing our universe into being (e. g., Isaac Asimov’s "Red Queen’s
Race")
Willis said that this was drifting into a
closely related genre, the alternate history story. She claimed Ward Moore’s Bring
the Jubilee was the first (which is not true even if you don’t count Livy),
and said that both it and Robert A. Heinlei n’s Job start in alternate
worlds from our own. She talked about the pitfalls of alternate history: the
divergence point is easy to do, but if you change everything as it would be
changed, the world rapidly becomes very unfamiliar (Robert Silverbe rg’s
"Via Roma" is my classic example of this, though if you read all the
stories in that series in internal chronological order, it is not quite so
jarring), and if you do not, it is not realistic (any story with an alternate
World War II and P resident Kennedy still elected in 1960).
Levinson said that he thought of alternate
history stories as lazy time travel stories and that we are not given any
explanation as to why the divergence should take place. (As an alternate
history aficionado, I must protest that this is not always tr ue. In fact,
often these days the reverse is the case—the author spends a lot of time
getting up to the divergence point and explaining it, then does not continue
with what the effects would be, but just ends the story there.
Panel:
The Past and Future of SF Short Stories: A Dialog
Saturday, 2 PM
James Patrick Kelly, Patrick (James) Nielsen Hayden
"One of SF’s best short story writers
and one of our best editors discuss the state of the SF short story."
Nielsen said that he edited the second half
of Tor doubles, giving me the image of his editing the B side of all of them.
Kelly began by asking, "How has the mighty
short story fallen?" He talked about the history of the short story,
citing the classic Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and
Space edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas as one of the
peaks. It was difficult to get novels published in 1940s, so "the short
story was king." Now, the short story’s economic status if not its
artistic status has eroded.
Nielsen Hayden hated to invoke the name, but
said that before Roger Elwood anthologies were considered more reliable than
novels. However, Elwood’s flooding of the markets in the early 1970s with
mediocre anthologies ended that. Now, single-author co llections are published
mostly as favors to authors (and often simultaneously with a novel so that the
lower sales figures of the collection do not cause bookstores to drop the
numbers they order). Anthologies are published for status or to make a philos
ophical statement (Hartwell’s "year best" promises the "good old
stuff" rather than the "literary stuff like in Starlight").
Nielsen Hayden echoed my sentiments when he
said (in a statement whose spelling I cannot guarantee), "I tend to
deplore the nichification of the field." He said that there are people who
say, "I like only hard-boiled female military her oes" and that,
fortunately or unfortunately, the field is large enough to cater to that.
When he started selling short fiction, Kelly
said he had a choice between magazines and original anthologies (edited by such
people as Robert Silverberg and Terry Carr). At that time, anthologies were
more prestigious and lasting. What killed that? (My immediate thought here was
the theme anthology.) Kelly asked, "Did we lose touch? Did we do too many
literary experiments? "
Nielsen Hayden thought that it just became an
over-exploited area of publishing. As he put it, "There were no real crap
anthologies before 1973 or ’74." Now it is actually easier for bad writers
to get published if they can write to spec. Isaac Asimov and Martin H.
Greenberg have a lot to answer for, he said. "[Mike] Resnick is proud that
he never turned down a story that he commissioned, but my eyes go pinwheel over
that."
Kelly said that there were fewer magazines
now than in the 1950s. However, the 1970s had six major magazines, the same
number as now. Of course, now the circulation is way down.
Kelly said that audiences change and the
market changes, and asked if short stories no longer meet a need. Nielsen
Hayden thought part of it was that the big names stopped writing short stories
as novels got more remunerative. For example, he asked, "When was the last
time Greg Bear wrote a short story?" Even Connie Willis’s short story
output, which is where her strength is, is way down.
Speaking about "hard science
fiction" as seen in Analog, Nielsen Hayden quoted Teresa Nielsen
Hayden as having said, "A lot of supposedly ‘hard’ SF is just SF that
foregrounds the numbers and talks tough about engineering."
From the audience, Jane Yolen suggested that
the marketing of short fiction is terrible: Asimov’s is using
tabloid-style headlines on its cover, but in general the packaging of magazines
is not as jazzy as other media packaging that the audience is familiar with.
Kelly said that the one magazine that is using more current packaging, Science
Fiction Age, is surviving against all odds.
Drifting somewhat away from short stories,
Nielsen Hayden said that mass-market science fiction never sold better than in
the 1950s, leading Kelly to ask, "Did the rise of experimental writing
pull good writers away from what readers wanted?" He thought that perhaps Asimov’s
reversed this by starting retro with Feghoots and space opera. Nielsen Hayden
thought it was more that Asimov’s "put out a signal that there was
fun here." That was what he wanted to do as well, saying that Starlight
was not a "literary" sort of anthology. "I don’t want to publish
Quark or New Worlds." Kelly thought that what Nielsen Hayden
was saying was not how Starlight is perceived, and that the attitude
seems to be, "If it’s too weird for Asimov’s, try it at Starlight."
Of course, Asimov’s is not as open to unusual stories as the older
anthologies either, Kelly noted, adding "Gardner wouldn’t buy some of the
Gardner Dozois stories that Silverberg bought [for Alpha and New
Dimensions]."
The question was raised whether editors ask
for rewriting often enough? Do they bother? Often not, Kelly thought, saying
that there were 300 people in SFWA when he started, now there are 1300. Nielsen
Hayden agreed, saying all it takes to join are & quot;three mediocre
stories to three trumped-up anthologies." He described what he was seeing
as the "growth of aspiring writer fandom." (I find it not unlike the
current spate of actors becoming directors not because of their directorial
talent, because they have the clout to do so.)
Someone mentioned that at least science
fiction was not as inbred as poetry, where there are six hundred people writing
works that sell six hundred copies. Kelly thought Clarion was turning out
forty-five to fifty "okay" writers a year. Nie lsen Hayden said that
Clarion is related to the fact that "science fiction is a very friendly
and social and sharing subculture." He said he did a workshop, but did not
"commit Clarion." They agreed that Clarion is focused on the &qu
ot;commercially saleable" part of writing science fiction. It is very
intense ("boot camp for writers"), and people there tend to bond—it
almost becomes a cult. Kelly said, "It’s a transformative experience but
the unfortunate thing is that it doesn’t always transform you into a
writer."
Getting back to the numbers, Kelly asked,
"Is there economic room in the market for five hundred writers?" And
Nielsen Hayden replied simply, "No." He referred back to poetry,
saying, "There have never been as many good poets writing in the United
States as today, and nobody knows about any of them?"
Kelly thought writers needed some place to
develop, saying, "No writer springs fully formed into print." Nielsen
Hayden disagreed somewhat, telling Kelly, "Your early stuff is really
ambitious garage rock, but a lot of the stuff I’m rea ding is somebody with a
synthesizer doing lounge music."
Yolen felt that we have gotten rid of the
"training wheels stories" and that we need more children’s stories.
Nielsen Hayden agreed, and said we should be starting children with fiction
that has some of the current sensibility, not the older classics. Kelly agreed,
saying that the older stories have no computers or video games, for example,
and children do not identify with anyone in them. Nielsen Hayden said that on
the plus side, popular culture is much better about science fiction than it
used to be. The problem, he said, is that "no big authors want to write
for kids. All the status is in writing science fiction for adults with adults’
concerns and sensibilities." Kids care about power and all the other
things that science fiction used to write about. "Take the science fiction
field up to 1960—it’s all YA." There are a lot of uses in publishing YA as
YA, he said, but we should publish science fiction as science fiction that
appeals to YA audience as well. Exam ple of this that he gave include Orson
Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
(Kelly said when he speaks to schools, he always gets asked whether he knows
Piers Anthony or Orson Scott Card.) Someone else mentioned that Steven Gould
does this also.
Nielsen Hayden said that book-buying is up
everywhere, but there are also a lot more cultural options these days. Someone
thought that book prices cause shell shock, but many other felt that people
were used to them, and that even children have the di scretionary income to
spend. Nielsen Hayden said his experience was that "when we talk about
selling to young people, I think price is a big issue." Yolen noted
that traditionally, short stories had not been popular with YA. Now they r ead
media tie-ins, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and Dean Koontz.
Someone asked, "What can be done for
putting literary science fiction on the Sci-Fi Channel [where it would be seen
by more people]?" Nielsen Hayden responded, "I think bagging the word
‘literary’ is a good start."
Kelly noted that even on a panel about short
stories, "In the past fifteen minutes we have migrated to the novel."
This is probably, he said, because novels have more literary impact. Nielsen
Hayden pointed out that there are a lot of write rs who are better at short
stories than novels. Kelly thought that one problem might be that since people
are not reading short stories, they do not understand the structure, etc., of
the short story.
(Someone in the audience, referring back to
the YA market, said that one reason short stories are not popular is that
children have books available in school libraries, but not magazines. Children
get their science fiction from school libraries these days? I am boggled.)
Panel:
Masters of SF Satire: The Science Fiction of Tenn, Sheckley, and Pohl
Saturday, 3 PM
John R. Douglas, David G. Hartwell (M), Mark Keller, Daniel Kimmel
"SF has always been a great field for
satire and the 1950s and 1960s produced some of the best. There were a number
of SF satirists, but the leading figures were Robert Sheckley, William Tenn,
and Fred Pohl. The panel discusses the works of these three as well as other SF
satirists."
Hartwell began by asking, "Who were the
others?" Kimmel named C. M. Kornbluth, and audience members suggested
Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury.
Douglas thought that, commercially, none have
lasted well, at least of the the major ones. He said that the 1950s was a very
conformist culture, while science fiction looked at change and wanted to be
something else. Keller thought that the button-do wn suburban culture was an
easy target. "And a safe target," Douglas added. One reason that
satire is a popular form of protest, he felt, is that if you were supposed to
laugh, you could not get angry.
Hartwell said it was a great age of humor,
including satire, mentioning Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Pogo, television humor,
etc. Keller felt that the 1950s was a time of release after being under great
pressure, and that it was not all Eisenhower conformi ty. There was no
Depression or war, and the Cold War had not started. (I would date the Cold War
at least from the Berlin Airlift, 1948.) Kimmel pointed out it was not a
fun time—for example, the Hollywood Blacklist was around. Douglas said tha t
one factor allowing science fiction satirists free rein was that science
fiction was not on the radar of the vast majority of the culture.
Hartwell said that the burgeoning of new
magazines in 1949 and 1950 (in particular, The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction and Galaxy) allowed a place for satire. Keller noted
that when these new markets opened up, older stories w hich had not had a
market got sold to them, and a lot was science fiction. Hartwell mentioned that
satirical novels, too, started to appear: Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s Space
Merchants has been in and out of print since then, and there we re other
novels, such as their Gladiator-at-Law and Edson McCann’s Preferred
Risk.
Kimmel said that while he is in awe of Pohl, Pohl’s
work is not screamingly funny. He thought Robert Sheckley was also satirical,
and funny, but better in the short story form. Someone in the audience
mentioned William Tenn, and Hartwell noted that T enn had only short stories
during this time. (Tenn refused to have a "Best of" anthology later
because he refused to let Lester Del Rey edit his work.)
Other satirists named included Theodore
Sturgeon, Frederic Brown, Stanislaw Lem (in the 1960s), and even Neal
Stephenson (in the present, with Snowcrash).
Someone suggested that satire went
mainstream, but Hartwell said, "Satire is, just bluntly, not the
mainstream of our culture right now." Terry Pratchett, he felt, is too
obvious about it, so is not popular in the United States (though hugel y popular
everywhere else). There are also Douglas Adams, Rudy Rucker, John Sladek (1960s
through 1980s), the early Tom Disch, and even Daniel Pinkwater. (Hartwell said,
"Satire is a constant part of Pinkwater’s books.") Kimmel added the
lat est book by John Varley, Golden Globe, and someone mentioned Ishmael
Reed.
Douglas said that satire can be done at any
length, but it is easier at short lengths. (So the relative abundance of satire
in the 1950s and its relative dearth now may be related to some of the factors
discussed in the previous panel on short fiction .) Longer science fictional
satirical works include John Barth’s Sotweed Factor, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, and Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Hartwell said that one reason for 1950s science fictio n satire being in short
fiction was that the science fiction novel had not been invented yet as a form
in the early 1950s. Kimmel repeated that Sheckley worked best at short stories.
though Hartwell thought Sheckley finally got the novel right with Mi ndswap.
As a satirist, Kurt Vonnegut provided a model for Sheckley and Dick.
Hartwell thought it interesting that at the
time, Pohl was perceived as the junior partner in the Pohl/Kornbluth
collaborations. This attitude persisted until the end of the 1960s, in spite of
the fact that in 1958 Kingsley Amis said that the principa l mode of science
fiction was satire, and so Frederik Pohl was the greatest living science
fiction writer.
Kimmel said that another pair writing satire
were Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (who as Lewis Padgett wrote "The
Twonky"). Keller said that the pairs played off each other, providing
"collaborative feedback." Hartwell said, " One of Kornbluth’s
contributions to satire was a high moral tone," and that Pohl alone does
not have that.
Kimmel thought the panelists should at least
define satire. He said that satire does not have to make us laugh, but Douglas
thought that "satire is about making us laugh and making someone else
bleed." Hartwell said that "black humor&q uot; is often used as a
term for dark satire, though not as much anymore. (He related that at a
screening of Mother Night, someone said it was a bad movie because it
made fun of the Holocaust. When the director said that it was black humor, a
bla ck woman got up and said that was a racist term. "This is why we don’t
have satire as a major mode of literature," Hartwell concluded.)
Douglas disagreed somewhat with that
conclusion, citing Thomas Pynchon, to which Hartwell responded, "And he
got it from reading science fiction."
Kimmel mentioned Eric Frank Russell as a
satirist; audience members added Keith Laumer, Harry Harrison, James Morrow,
Joanna Russ, and David Prill (who apparently wrote a story in which the
national sport is embalming). Hartwell said that "Doones bury" rather
than "Dilbert" was satire.
Hartwell said that a characteristic of the
1990s is that we’ve all gotten interested in marketing. (Mark points out that a
disproportionate number of characters in movies are advertising people.)
Hartwell thought the beginning of the film Wolf is a fairly accurate
representation of publishing.
Kimmel said that theater people say,
"Satire is what closes on Saturday night." Someone asked, "Isn’t
litigation the death of satire?" There is some truth to this; one the
panelists mentioned that Tom Lehrer said that he quit sing ing because there
was no place for satire in a world where Henry Kissinger could be given the
Nobel Peace Prize, but he also lost a lawsuit brought by Werner Von Braun
regarding Lehrer’s song about Von Braun.
Someone mentioned the book Publish and
Perish. (I have no idea if this is the collection by James Hynes subtitled
"Three Tales of Tenure and Terror" or the Christian mystery by Sally
S. Wright.) Keller said that it was "not a sa tire but an accurate
simulation." Satire, he added, is hard to take because it is deadpan, not
funny. Someone asked if satire can work if you don’t know the subject being
satirized. Hartwell thought so, saying "Satire requires an aesthetic di
stance on the part of the audience from the work" And someone pointed out
that Gilbert and Sullivan addressed the same sort of bureaucracy as Dilbert,
leading Sue Anderson to suggest "Dilbert and Sullivan."
Panel:
You Probably Haven't Heard of ... But You Should Have and You Will
Saturday, 4 PM
Ginjer Buchanan, Laura Anne Gilman, Evelyn C. Leeper, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
(M)
[Thanks to Mark, who in spite of a bad cold
managed to take notes for me for this panel.]
This is one of those panels where I am not
sure why I was put on it. Yes, I read a lot, and a lot of
"non-mainstream" authors, but I am not really in touch with new
authors.
I did suggest Jeremy Strahan’s Year’s Best
Australian SF & Fantasy 2, and in general, I thought that any
Australian author whose works made it to the United States was probably worth
reading. I also recommended Herbert Rosendorfer’s Lett ers Back to Ancient
China and Ronald Wright’s Scientific Romance, as well as works by
Sean McMullen, and Bernard Werber’s Empire of the Ants. I suggested that
the more offbeat science fiction works could be found by reading such publica
tions as Publishers Weekly.
The other panelists were more in touch with
new authors: Gilman is at ROC, Buchanan is at Ace, and Nielsen Hayden is at
Tor.
Gilman recommended Caitlan R. Kiernan (Silk),
saying Kiernan had not received a third of the attention she deserved.
Many Australians and their works were
recommended. Buchanan said that some of the best writing was coming out of
Australia, but that one must read Locus assiduously to discover it. She
said, "If you like Steve Baxter and Peter Hamilton, l ook in
November" for Sean Williams and Shane Dix’s Divergence: The Prodigal
Sun (coming from Ace and previously published in Australia); she described
it as "really good, old-fashioned in a certain sense but with a new
sensibility." Williams and Dix also wrote Universal Soldier.
Many of these works did not or will not
appear in hardcover, making them more affordable but less visible. Nielsen
Hayden said that they try to do the good stuff first in hardcover. He said that
Tor’s contribution to bringing over Australian Seans wa s Sean McMullen’s Souls
in the Great Machine duology. McMullen also wrote The Centurions’ Empire.
Tor also has the American rights to works by Isobelle Carmody, whom Nielsen
Hayden said was as popular in Australia as Brooks and Pratchett ar e here.
Gilman liked Kate Forsyth’s Witches of
Eileanan and The Pool of Two Moons, which she described as fantasy
with a Scottish twist. The first (I believe) is a retelling of James I, but you
do not know this at the beginning. Gilman said her first rule is "no books
in dialect," but Forsyth pulled her in and she read straight through
lunch. The comment about dialect led me to mention that Russell Hoban’s Riddley
Walker is out in a new edition with notes. Buchanan asked, &qu ot;Is he
still with us?" I responded that yes, he was, but he does not appeal to
millions and millions, (I also liked his latest science fiction, Fremder.)
Buchanan mentioned Jeffrey Barlough’s Dark
Sleeper, saying "If Charles Dickens wrote fantasy, it would be this
book." Barlough is a veterinarian who self-published a hundred copies of
this for friends, and then submitted it to Ace. I t is the first of a projected
seven-book series, and will be published in trade paperback.
The comments about dialect reminded Nielsen
Hayden of Alasdair Gray, who wrote in dialect, and was not published by Tor.
("I am basically a genre guy," Nielsen Hayden said.) Gray illustrates
his own stuff in quasi-woodcuts, and he is depres sive. He wrote "The
Great Bear Cult" about a quasi-fascist movement where everyone dressed up
in bear costumes and chanted "bears are strong but bears are gentle."
(It can be found in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.)
I mentioned Nisi Shawl and Nalo Hopkinson.
Nielsen Hayden thought Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring was
"sharp as several whips."
I asked what had happened to Ted Chiang.
Buchanan said he never made it to a novel (which somehow implies that short
fiction is not as important as novels—see previous panel). Nielsen Hayden said
that Chiang’s first story won a Nebula, which he found intimidating. (Actually,
what Nielsen Hayden said was, "I met him and he looked terrified.")
(It turns out that Chiang had a story in Starlight 2, which I didn’t get
around to reading until after Boskone.)
Buchanan said, "We will be publishing
someone you have not heard of—Nina Kiriki Hoffman (whom Bob Devney described as
like Zenna Henderson with sex). I had heard of Hoffman, who wrote The
Thread That Binds the Bones and The Silent Strength of Stones, two
unrelated books in spite of the rhyme. Hoffman’s latest is A Red Heart of
Memories.
Nielsen Hayden recommended Ken MacLeod’s Star
Fraction, The Stone Canal, and The Cassini Division. He noted
that MacLeod was the only Trotskyist to win the Libertarian Prometheus Award—twice.
Tor is publishing the last two , and Nielsen Hayden hopes to get the first.
"I like his universe, The big ideas of science fiction have changed the
world." Nielsen Hayden also referred to "the big concepts of the
human future."
Gilman suggested Anne Bishop’s Daughter of
the Blood (which she described as "a malevolent fantasy about the
redemptive powers of love), Heir to the Shadows, and Queen of
Darkness. Other suggestions included Eric S. Nylund’s Signal to Noise;
Sharon Shinn’s Wrapt in Crystal (a free-standing novel, not part of her
series). Nielsen Hayden said in passing that he thought we needed a panel on
writers you think you have pegged. For example, Bruce Sterling’s latest n ovel,
Distraction, is not at all what people might expect. (However, this
indicates that we had certainly drifted far afield from writers "You
Probably Haven’t Heard of.")
Returning to new authors, Nielsen Hayden said
there was Thomas Harlan’s fantasy series, "Shadow of Ararat," set in
a world in which Rome never ended and magic works. I asked how many books were
in this series; Nielsen Hayden said that Tor b ought four.
This led to mentions of other
religious/historical books: Graham Joyce’s Requiem, Gore Vidal’s Duluth,
and S. M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time. A more straight
historical fantasy named was Christie Golden’s A.D. 99.< /P>
Panel:
Rampaging Dinosaurs, Jet Propelled Turtles, & Giant Spiders: BIG Monster
Movies
Saturday, 5 PM
Julie E. Czerneda, Bob Eggleton, Daniel Kimmel (M), Mark R. Leeper, Jim Mann
"From King Kong to Godzilla, from Them
to Gamera, giant monsters have attracted movie goers. The panel discusses the
popularity of movies about big monsters—and why some work (despite plot
absurdities) and others don’t."
[Leeper provided a list of all giant monster
films through 1990. Unfortunately, the disk file has gone missing.]
Kimmel noticed me taking notes in the front
and began by saying that he was always nice to me and Bob Devney because
"they have the power to quote me."
When Kimmel introduced Leeper, he said to
Leeper, "You’ve been with Bell Labs when it was just two cans and a
string," to which Leeper responded, "Longer than that. I was the one
who suggested opening the cans."
Kimmel starting by saying, "Before this
turns into a Godzilla/Gamera/King Kong love fest ..." to which I called
out, "Which would be a hell of a movie also." But what he wanted was
for the panelists to name their favorite giant mon ster movies not
including those three characters.
Eggleton said his favorite was Them.
Czerneda liked 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Leeper chose categories
instead: Harryhausen films and those directed by Eugène Lourié (The Beast
from 20,000 Fathoms, The Gian t Behemoth, and Gorgo). Mann
agreed with Eggleton and Leeper, naming Them and the Lourié films.
Kimmel points out that Leeper left out
important films from his list, such as Dragonslayer and The Blob.
While Leeper conceded the former, he explained he had set a twenty-foot minimum
height. Discussion ensued as to whether the Blob me t this height requirement.
Similarly, Food of the Gods was not included, because the rats and
chickens were under twenty feet tall. Lair of the White Worm was another
missing film, though it would count only if the worm stood up. Kimmel l ater
gave another one, The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rock, Lou Costello’s only
solo film, which Kimmel said clearly met Mark’s criterion. (I think that some
of the old Hercules movies also had giant monsters.)
Returning to Them, Mann said it was
good because it was well-written and well-paced. Leeper said it was basically a
police procedural in which the clues get weirder and weirder. Eggleton said it
also did not have cheap-looking effects, though Leeper pointed out that they
got by with only one-and-a-half ants.
Leeper said that there are two philosophies
of special effects: realistic effects, or effects that advance the plot. He
described seeing an opera done with puppets—no one thought the puppets were
realistic, but they served the purpose of conveying the story.
Returning to Godzilla (and bad special
effects), Eggleton said that the series went "non-serious" in 1964
after Godzilla versus the Thing. Up to that point, they were about man
messing around with something and not knowing what he was doing. Kimmel said
that the only American film in this group he takes seriously ("not a
popcorn movie") is Them, but in Japan the original Gojira
was qualify. Eggleton pointed out that in Japan it atomic radiation was part of
th eir history. But by 1964 he said that Godzilla had become a comment on
commercialism and capitalism. (He felt that The Incredible Shrinking Man
was another serious American film. Debate took place over whether this counted,
with one issue being whether Scott Carey had a ruler shrunk with him.)
Mann felt one distinguishing characteristic
was that serious films show the results of the monster attacks (bodies, crushed
buildings, etc.), while others do not.
Someone in the audience thought that Tarantula
tried to do what Them did. Someone else said that The Deadly Mantis
is a serious film about the air defense system.
Someone asked why, if The Mysterians
is on the list, where is Kronos?
Another question is why some of the absurd
films work and some do not. Eggleton said it was a combination of charm and
"kaiju-ega" (which he probably defined but I cannot remember).
Czerneda said that monsters were so unreal that they were safe and would not
scare you the way realistic films would. Kimmel pointed out that all
caveman/dinosaur movies are unrealistic. He also cited the square/cube law as
another problem with all these films.
Someone in the audience liked Reptilicus
because it was written by Ib Melchior, a real writer. Burstein (and my notes
fail to say whether it was Michael or Nomi) said that Gojira had the
pacing of a Japanese film, not like an American fi lm. Someone else said a film
of this type, though without a giant monster, was The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao.
Someone else said that Gorath had a giant walrus, but it was cut out of
the American version.
There was a lot of talk about the latest
Godzilla film, little of it positive. Eggleton said that in the 1950s, Irving
Levine got the original Godzilla footage to add to the Hercules movies, but
then decided it was its own movie.
Eggleton said that Legend of the Dinosaurs
is the worst film he has ever seen. People did like Tremors, Deep
Rising, and Monolith Monsters.
Eggleton thought all these films gave people
a sense of control. Leeper saw it more as deconstructing the society in a more
literal way than usual.
(Other films often overlooked that occurred
to me later were Chang, Moby Dick, and Jaws.)
Guest
of Honor and Other Speeches
Saturday, 9 PM
Connie Willis was introduced as having
"been writing since the late Cretaceous—she certainly invented the late
Cretaceous." Unfortunately, no transcript or tape is available of her
speech, so I’ll include the few quotes I was able to jot dow n (a la Devney):
[The original letter asking her to be the
Guest of Honor mistakenly said it was for the 1998 Boskone]: "I thought
this was 1998."
"I have been up a really long time
today, so if I nod off in the middle of speech ... [nodding off]."
She began with the news on everyone’s mind,
or least every television, newspaper, an jungle drum: Clinton’s acquittal.
"My name is Connie Willis and I’m a CNN
junkie."
Her award for "Crabbiest House
Manager" was tie between Bob Barr and [someone] Sensenbrenner.
"The most used word was not
"proportionality" or "rule-of-law" (which is one word), but
"besmirched."
Willis reported that "Linda Tripp said
that she hoped someone someday did to her daughter what she did to Monica
Lewinsky." Laughter followed.
But Congress was back to its normal business
of running the country, she said. Already, a bill had been introduced to add
Ronald Reagan to Mount Rushmore, even though there was a good chance it would
make Lincoln’s nose fall off. In other news, Tinky -Winky was designated as the
gay Teletubbie, and we also had the return of Dan Quayle. "So I have been
on the phone to my representatives asking that they impeach someone
again."
"What is Trent Lott’s hair made
of?"
She then talked about writing. There is a
"great movie about writers: Rich and Famous. It is the most
realistic depiction....except ...." She then listed a few inaccuracies,
beginning with the fact that in the movie "no one eve r picks up a
pencil."
In real life, "there are no mink coats,
no sex in airplane bathrooms, there is no time, the book is overdue, the
computer ate chapter 19, you don’t know what happens in chapter 20, you don’t
know what happened in chapter 18, ...." (I need to learn shorthand if I’m
going to try to transcribe Willis’s long lists!)
Willis then gave good reasons to be a writer:
"You get to make up stories and not be subpoenaed by Ken Starr. At least
yet. You get to behave like a lunatic and no one locks you up. You ask people,
‘Do you think apes have souls? Where do fads come from?’"
(She described going to her doctor about a
cold and asking him about the symptoms of scrofula (for Doomsday Book,
one presumes). "Why? Do you think you have it?"
"You get to be interested in macabre and
disgusting things [and] perform bizarre rituals." (Hemingway sharpened 37
pencils every morning—and used a typewriter. Willis says her ritual is that she
uses only Red Chief tablets.)
"You get rejection slips, writer’s
block, writer’s cramp, and angry letters from readers. You get to read. You get
to do research." Regarding the last, she said she discovered that in the
1600s there was this huge speculation fad about tu lip bulbs—"does this
remind you of the beanie baby fad?" She also learned about spiritualists,
such as the Fox sisters, who made sounds by cracking their toe joints. Later,
when they demonstrated this to debunk themselves, no one believed them . Madame
Blavatsky at one point denied using trap doors, smacking the wall to emphasize
her point—and the trap door flew up.
Someone once asked her, "You have
opinions about everything, don’t you?" To which she replied, "Well, yes,
doesn’t everyone? I thought that was the whole point."
"You get to contradict D. H. Lawrence
and argue with Oscar Wilde."
"Writing conquers time, space, gender,
race, the laws of physics, and death."
And she finished with "I think it is the
best job in the world even if there isn’t much sex in airplane bathrooms."
(Regarding research, Willis talked about how
to research To Say Nothing of the Dog, she had to read A, which led her
to B, which made her read C, and so on. I find the same problem even when I’m not
doing research. I recently started re ading Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human. When I got to the chapter on The Merchant of
Venice I had to go read that, and then John Gross’s Shylock. That
led me to William Hazlitt’s Characters in Shakespear’s P lays [sic] and
would have led me to John Ruskin’s Munera Pulveris if I could have found
a copy. But there is still Faye Kellerman’s Quality of Mercy and
Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and ....)
The
Best of the Art Show: A Guided Tour
Sunday, 10 AM
Stephen Youll
This was the first time we had done this, and
I would definitely recommend it to other people. We started off with just the
three of us, but accreted people as we went. Having an artist talk about the
various pieces—what he likes, what he does not li ke, how the artists achieves
his effects, and so on—is very useful, particularly for people who are
"art neos."
Panel:
This Book Sucks: How Not To Write Reviews
Sunday, 11 AM
Thomas A. Easton, Peter J. Heck, Evelyn C. Leeper, Steven Sawicki
"What makes a bad book review? What
sorts of things should book reviewers do? What kinds of behaviors should the
avoid?"
I managed to wipe out my notes from this
panel, so this is a summary (written a month later) from memory. However, there
was not a lot of new information over previous such panels.
The general consensus was that people try to
avoid writing negative reviews. This is partly because people try to avoid
reading bad books. However, when a major author writes a bad book, reviewers
feel obliged to warn people. And all the reviewers a dmitted to the fact that
it was often more fun to review a bad book than a good book. Perhaps that why
they agreed that they were more likely to review a bad book when they were
starting out than now.
I said that in addition to avoiding bad
books, I no longer review books in a series until the series is completed. I do
not want to send someone to the first book in a series, only to have everything
go downhill from there.
Sawicki said that he not only does he get
complaints about negative reviews, but he has written positive reviews and
gotten complaints from the authors, so there’s no predicting what the response
will be.
In response to a question about how readers
can know how to interpret a review, I said that if I have any particular biases
about the book, I say it up front—for example, that I really like alternate
history, or that I’m not particularly interested in sports. Easton agreed,
saying it was important to say where you are coming from, to let people know.
And I observed that after you read the same reviewer for a while, you get to
know if you can trust a review or not, or at least how to interpret it. Th is
is why Usenet postings are often not very helpful—when someone you’ve never
heard of posts "This book sucks!" with no other explanation, this
tells you nothing. (Although in fairness, this happens more in the movie groups
with "This mov ie sucks!" "This movie kicks ass!" is
equally uninformative, and "This movie sucks ass!" positively
incoherent.)
Panel:
Why Is This Timeline Different from All Other Timelines? Jewish Alternate
Histories
Sunday, 12 N
Esther Friesner, Mark Keller (M), Evelyn C. Leeper, Susan Shwartz
Shwartz began by mentioning a book she had
written, Grail of Hearts, involving Richard Wagner, but it was not clear
whether this was alternate history. I said I preferred Biblical (or otherwise
ancient) change points, but I recognized that the problem with them is that if
they are realistic, things change too much to be recognizable (as I noted, you
might as well write about another planet), or if they are recognizable, they
are not accurate. And of course another problem is the readers’ gener al
unfamiliarity with ancient history.
Friesner addressed the former issue, saying
that one solution is, "Just don’t bring it too far forward." She
would like to see someone use a turning point not previously touched, when the
Khazars considered converting en masse to Judaism. W hat would have happened if
they had?
Schwartz says she likes to write about the
Jews of Byzantium (e.g., Shards of Empire).
Friesner said she is going to be writing
mainstream works about historical Jewish women. "One I want to do, she
said, "is Esther Kira," who built an empire in Istanbul, selling to
the harem. (My spelling of the name may be off.) There followed a bit of a
digression about the Turkish rulers and the harem system, leading to someone’s
suggestion that Dune was really an alternate history.
Returning to the topic, Keller said that the
first English-language alternate history story is Edward Everett Hale’s
"Hands Off": "What if Joseph had not been sold as a slave?"
Hale’s conclusion is that we would end up as cannibals killing each other.
I noted someone had suggested Disraeli’s Alroy
as an alternate history. This is about David Alroy, who set up a Jewish kingdom
in Iraq in the twelfth century. While I suspect that the book attributes more
success and power to Alroy than is acc urate, I would not call it alternate
history (secret history, maybe), but I thought the attendees might enjoy it.
We touched briefly on a Jewish Rome. Shwartz
felt that Judaism would not have worked for Rome, but Keller thought a
ferocious monotheism could take over a pantheism. I noted that the story
"The Wandering Christian" by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne used some of
this idea. We did manage to avoid getting side-tracked into the "What If
Jesus Had Never Been Born?" set of alternate histories.
I suggested as a point of divergence the Jews
not being expelled from Spain. I also asked why we do not see more Jewish
alternate histories. Friesner said that when she gets an idea she wants to hold
it forever. Also, when you write you have to star t with accessibility.
However, she added, one of the duties of a writer is to build a bridge, because
"the more understanding the less hitting."
Shwartz said that for her, writing about
Judaism is personal. "Grail of Hearts was sheer anguish to write. I
can write other things and sell a lot easier."
Nomi Burstein suggested that someone should
write about the idea of Chaim Weitzmann as a scientist working on atomic bomb.
She also mentioned something about an attempt to establish a Jewish colony in
upstate New York (which reminded me and others of the "Jewish Chicken
Farmers of New Jersey"), and the idea of Madagascar as a Jewish homeland.
One of these (I forget which) caught Michael Burstein’s fancy and he looked at
her as if to say, "Why are you giving these great ideas away to ot her
writers?"
As for accessibility, there is a lot of
Jewish history that might provide some material, but people do not know it. For
example, most people (including most Jews) do not know all that much about the
various Jewish kingdoms. Jewish histories concentra te almost entirely on
Ashkenazic history. And Jewish history also emphasizes powerlessness, according
to Keller. So going counter to this can prove interesting. For example, what if
the "hidden Jews" of New Mexico had reasserted themselves?
Of course, many people see some traditional
Jewish writing as being alternate histories. Friesner thought that Esther was
basically "what if Ishtar had been a nice Jewish girl?" Keller said
that there was a Talmudic discussion of what might have happened if King
Hezekiah (in 2 Kings 20) had died before fathering Manasseh. Someone asked if
the two variations of creation story are alternate histories. And further
variations are endless. What if Pharaoh’s daughter had not found Moses? What if
there were no kingdom under Saul and David?
I suggested that other points of divergence
might be changes in the restrictive laws that forced Jews into certain
professions. If Jews were allowed to own land, we might have had more Jewish
farmers, and so on. Shwartz said that in Israel you have t hat—for example,
Jewish fighter pilots. (Keller said that someone said if Israel ever got going
its citizens would be lousy soldiers, but they would have a good university.)
I closed by saying that I like what Keller
said about powerlessness, and how alternate histories can counteract that.
Shwartz said that for all the appearance of powerlessness, "We have always
had the power of the word."
The
Origins of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Theories and Science Fiction
Sunday, 1 PM
Mark Keller, Evelyn C. Leeper (M), Paul Levinson
[This was my third panel in a row, and so my
notes were going rapidly downhill.]
I suppose I should attempt to summarize
Jaynes’s theory as expressed in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Briefly, Jaynes says that human
consciousness came into being as recently as 3000 years ago, an d that this can
be used to explain why the ancients thought they heard the gods speaking to
them. All this is connected somehow to the "left brain/right brain"
theory. And if this is all you know about the theory, I suspect that the
following will not be entirely coherent.
(When I first mentioned this panel to Mark,
he said, "I’m of two minds about this.")
I started by noting that I am not a
psychologist, nor do I have any background in psychology. I think Jaynes’s idea
is interesting and can be a good starting point for science fiction but, as
with time travel and faster-then-light travel, I do not thi nk it has any basis
in fact. (In this respect, I would compare it to Aristotle’s theories that
inspired Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters.)
Jaynes begins with a comparison of the Iliad
and the Odyssey. The former, he claims, is a description of life before
consciousness, the latter after.
Levinson said that the corpus coliseum
is the main brain connection, but our attitudes toward scientific research are
not such that we can go around cutting this in healthy people to see what
happens. (One rather science fictional possibility w ould be if we found viable
ancient embryos—they might become bicameral, or they might not.)
Levinson said he had actually heard Jaynes
speak, and had discussed all this with Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan thought that
Jaynes had overlooked the importance of the alphabet, but Levinson said that
this was not completely true.
Keller thought that the whole
"right/left" brain dichotomy is overemphasized, but said that
Jaynes’s theory does emphasize the shift to a literate society. For further
information on this, he recommended Leonard Shlain’s recent book, The
Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. However,
he said, Jaynes did seem to overlook the differences between an
alphabetic language and a pictographic one. For example, when you read Chinese,
you do not hear the sou nds as you do in alphabetic languages. And the disease
"agnosia" causes you to lose the ability to read the latter, but not
the former.
Levinson said that the alphabet versus
pictograph issue had other implications. For example, it is difficult to describe
an omnipresent, invisible, etc., being in a pictographic language, or at least
in an ancient hieroglyphic language. The Hebrew pr ophets, he noted, existed
after the alphabet, and had "a foot in each world." Keller later also
said we should also distinguish between a phonetic and a phonemic language.
Jaynes seems to base his claims more on his
desired results than on objective evidence. For example, he says that
schizophrenia is dysfunctional because it’s not common, and if it were common
it would not be dysfunctional. Levinson said that (Karl?) Popper describes
these types of claims as non-falsifiable. However, since schizophrenics in
institutions do not form communities, this would seem to be some sort of
contradicting evidence.
Keller said that another influence (or
effect) of the voices was that for a long time reading was done out loud. In
fact, St. Augustine noted when his teacher read silently because it was so
unusual. Suford Lewis named Joan of Arc as a modern example of someone hearing
voices. It was suggested that she may have been ill in a way that led her to
hear voices. Bob Ingria said that Socrates said he had a "daimon"
that told him if he was doing or saying something wrong. Levinson added that So
crates did not like writing, which he felt would lead to memory loss, and would
also lead to the idea of only one unchanging opinion. I had also heard that he
felt that unless he was there to explain them, his words could be
misinterpreted.
The two best known works based on Jaynes’s
work are Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Harry Turtledove’s Between
Two Rivers. There are also Levinson’s "Consciousness Plague,"
Turtledove’s "Bluff," and Margaret Wander B onanno’s Preternatural.
Bob Ingria said that William Burroughs
thought that language was a plague from outer space. Keller said that Samuel
Delany used language as agent of change in Babel-17 and Empire Star.
Someone else mentioned Jack Vance’s Languages of Pao.
Someone asked if Jaynes thought that all people
had the same two minds. Levinson did not know. He did say that Jaynes’s theory
claims to explain about bluffing and the origins of deceit. Now, Levinson said,
we can imagine what is real and what is no t real, and decide to "go with
the not-real." In the bicameral situation, both minds speak, while now,
one can hide the other. Someone noted that chimpanzees can practice deceit, but
Levinson said that Jaynes was not necessarily saying this tr ait is phylogenic.
Someone closed by saying that virtual reality
gives you voices in your head and brings this to the forefront, so he thought
this might make some of these theories falsifiable. (Of course, knowing you are
in a virtual reality would undoubtedly make a d ifference.)
To summarize various comments from this
discussion and elsewhere:
·
On the one hand, Jaynes’
theory does explain the preponderance of living, speaking gods in Sumerian and
Assyrian texts, the Bible, and the Odyssey. It also helps explain
schizophrenia.
·
Jaynes eliminates the
idea that consciousness is some miraculous gift which was imposed from without,
and in a much more humanistic, rational way than the behaviorists do (at least
according to some). Jaynes answers the previously unanswerable questi on: if we
are conscious, and animals are not, and we evolved from animals, where did
consciousness come from? (Of course, we can also debate whether animals are
conscious.)
On the other hand, there are many unanswered
questions. Jaynes had implied a follow-up book, but he died five years ago, so
he can no longer respond to some of the criticisms of his theories. These
include:
·
There is no reason to
assume that the difference between "preconscious" and
"conscious" is as sharp a distinction as Jaynes takes for granted it
is.
·
Jayne’s claim that the
locus of consciousness can be considered as being anywhere it wants is much
disputed.
·
Jaynes dismisses
prehistoric China (which does not support his theories), and ignores
pre-Columbian America, as well as other areas.
·
There is a fair argument
that we achieved a complex language 30,000 years ago, not 3,000 as Jaynes
claims.
·
Jaynes shows that
consciousness is not necessary to various behaviors, but then he make the leap
to assert that consciousness is never associated with these processes.
·
On page 76, Jaynes
asserts that the Iliad is history, and not a fit subject for literary
analysis, because elements of it have been verified historically. (This is
similar to Biblical fundamentalists who claim that the existence of historical
elements in a work proves the historicity of the whole. Is Dragnet
historical because Los Angeles exists?) Also, Jaynes does not take the Homer’s
heroes’ athletic feats as seriously as he appears to take their visions, and he
seems totally unawar e with how epic poetry gets composed. [Alan Scott]
·
Jaynes implies that
consciousness itself has an effect on the evolution of the physical brain. This
is certainly questionable.
·
Consciousness, while
advantageous, also has an evolutionary disadvantage, causing paralysis and indecision
in the face of danger.
·
On pages 186-187, Jaynes
insists that any subjectivity in ancient language (which would weaken his case)
is the imposition of modern sensibility and consciousness upon a non-conscious
behavior, but he rarely if ever attempts to adequately support this assertion.
·
Conversely, Jaynes later
spends a lot of time reinterpreting ancient records whose translations are
ambiguous to support his view, in what can only be considered a subjective
manner, primarily by assertion. Similarly, Jaynes makes references to "
;bicameral civilizations" as established fact rather than the thing he is
trying to establish.
·
On page 207, Jaynes
confuses conciliation with compromise and negotiation. [Alan Scott]
·
Later on the same page,
Jaynes says that when a priestly hierarchy (such as those he contends are
expressions of preconscious bicameral societies) is disturbed, the disturbances
get exaggerated in ways that "in a police state, would not occur.&qu
ot; Actually, in a police state this is just how they do occur.
(Final comment: In Snow Crash, Neal
Stephenson suggests that modern consciousness was forced into existence by
Enki, who devised an incantation whose effect was to force his subjects into
consciousness. Before this, everyone spoke the primordia l language of the
brain, a language which is inborn and does not have to be learned. Enki’s
incantation cut its hearers off from the primordial language, and thereafter
human languages began to diverge and multiply. First of all, while Noam Chomsky
prop osed that all human languages can be reduced to a basic "deep
structure" rooted in the physiology of the brain, no neurologist or
cognitive scientist believes that this "deep structure" could
actually be spoken aloud in a language that everyone would understand,
regardless of their native tongue. And the idea that there was an actual virus
fired off in Sumer is even more questionable. How would it have gotten to South
America before the Spanish—or is the claim it did not?)
I really enjoyed this panel, I think the
audience did also, and I hope that future Boskones will do this with other
theories.
(One gripe: we were in a room scheduled for a
charity event after us, and people started coming in and setting up at least
fifteen minutes before the end of the hour, interrupting us, leaving the door
open and letting hall noise come in, and so on. Th is encouraged people waiting
in the hall to also come in early, and in general made the last ten minutes
much less productive than they might have been.)
Next year’s Boskone will be February 18-20,
2000, in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Evelyn C. Leeper may be reached via e-mail or you may visit her Homepage.
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